Raising the Ceiling on HP Integrity - Intel and HP Roadmaps Breathe New Life for Itanium

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SM SM Navigator Navigating Information Technology Horizons Published Since 1993 Report #TCG2011014 April 8, 2011 Raising the Ceiling on HP Integrity — Intel and HP Roadmaps Breathe New Life for Itanium Analyst: David Reine

Management Summary When you start to shop for goods or services, do you check out the product reviews on the Internet? Do you ever wonder who posted the “rave”? Do you ever wonder who posted the “rant”? I have my doubts as to how many of these so-called “reviews” are legitimate. Was the “rave” posted by a thrilled consumer who can’t believe what a bargain they got, or was it posted by a company employee who was using a thesaurus to describe the advantages of his own project? And the “rant”, was it posted by a disgusted consumer who couldn’t believe how badly he had been taken, or by a rival company trying to dissuade you for ever buying such defective merchandise? I have just returned from a vacation at a resort hotel, after doing due diligence in trying to find the perfect destination. I checked out all of the reviews, some favorable, some not so. Those that were “not so” could not have been further from the truth! We had a wonderful time and just shook our heads at those “reviewers” who were so critical. There are other times, however, when you know who the reviewer is and you suspect that there may be an ulterior motive to the conclusions being drawn. In a statement from Oracle on March 23rd, Oracle once again picks on their favorite punching bag, HP, and not so coincidentally takes a shot at Intel. Oracle has stated that they will no longer support Oracle products or its applications on the Itanium processor, claiming that Intel informed them that Itanium was at end-of-life and they (Intel) would focus on their x86 architecture, except that Paul Otellini, President and Chief Executive Officer of Intel said: Not so fast. He disputed that conclusion. Interestingly enough, when Oracle was only a software company, HP and Itanium were among Oracle’s most important server platforms; now that Oracle (with its Sun acquisition) is a hardware company with their own proprietary microprocessor architecture (SPARC), Itanium is dead to them. Is Oracle putting enterprises and government agencies that use Itanium at risk? Is Itanium dead? We don’t think so. With Poulson and Kittson already announced to supersede Tukwila, Itanium would appear to have plenty of life left in it. However, what of HP’s Integrity and Superdome? Is HP still committed to the Intel Itanium roadmap? HP tells us that it will continue the development of Itanium-based Integrity platforms with its HP- UX operating system, along with a roadmap for the next decade. Furthermore, HP is committed to support their customers running existing versions of Oracle software on Itanium-based systems during that timeframe. Does retaining your existing application set on Itanium-based Integrity servers make sense to you, or do you want to initiate a multi- year migration to another application environment? If you see significant growth in the near IN THIS ISSUE future and believe that you need more of the same, only with faster processors and increased per-  Mission-Critical Data Center Issues...... 2 formance capability, perhaps you need to stay  The Intel Itanium Processor...... 3 with your existing architecture. To learn more  The HP Integrity Platform...... 4 about where Intel is taking Itanium and where HP is taking Integrity, please read on.  Conclusion ...... 5

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Mission-Critical Data Center Issues When each server is connected to the Internet, Today’s enterprise data center is faced with the number of sales queries can rise dramati- a myriad of issues, starting with the sprawl of cally, and if the response is not immediate, that under-utilized servers that proliferate not only potential customer could be lost to the compe- throughout the data center, but also throughout tition. Furthermore, each deployment requires the enterprise as a whole. This sprawl contri- higher security in order to protect important butes to an increase in the total cost of owner- corporate and customer data. The IT staff must ship (TCO) of the IT infrastructure, not only have an efficient method of encryption in order due to wasted compute cycles, but also due to to protect the data in their charge. the wasted resources required to operate the The staff must be able to accelerate the servers and cool the IT environment. In addi- deployment of new platforms through a con- tion, the data center is spending an exorbitant verged infrastructure, in order to reduce com- amount for server administration and main- plexity and increase ease of use. It requires tenance on this heterogeneous mix of under- tight integration between the operating system utilized systems. and the myriad mission-critical, web, and busi- Today’s enterprise data center needs to sim- ness applications residing on their servers. It plify the IT infrastructure in order to accelerate goes without saying that the enterprise must: the deployment of mission-critical business  Optimize valuable data center floor space applications, along with other middleware and and energy resources; Web-facing solutions, and also lower the TCO  Take advantage of the densest architectures of that infrastructure. These data center require- possible with the lowest energy and cool- ments can be lumped into four categories: ing requirements for new deployments;  High Performance – to ensure highly-  Protect the investment that the enterprise concurrent and virtualized processing; must make today to ensure that today’s  Affordable scalability – to lower the TCO purchase will not be obsolete tomorrow; of the IT infrastructure;  Ensure the ability to upgrade to the next  Availability – to provide continuous generation of server hardware as an essen- access in a 24x7x365 Internet-connected tial requirement in any current procurement world; and decision.  Security – to protect critical data and ser- What servers make up this complex data- vices, and management. sharing nightmare? First, and foremost, are the In order to reduce the server sprawl that is mission-critical UNIX applications servers. manifest throughout most older data centers, This class of server is primarily deployed on today’s IT staff is looking toward servers with one of three platform families: HP’s Integrity high performance based upon multi-core pro- Servers, running HP-UX, IBM’s Power Sys- cessors, with multiple threads per core – thus tems, running AIX, and Oracle’s (née Sun) Sun consolidating the sprawl of older, under-utilized Fire Systems, running Solaris. At the same servers and virtualizing each core to achieve time, many Internet infrastructure applications higher efficiency and better resource utilization. run on commodity Intel Xeon x86 servers under These servers also need to be scalable – so that the Windows, Linux, or Solaris operating sys- the staff can expand application deployment tems. Due to a variety of reasons, many of dynamically in response to a changing business these platforms are anywhere from three-to- climate. In order to parallelize the IT architec- five-years old, inefficient, and expensive to ture, the IT staff must depend upon multi- operate. This is the result of continuing main- threaded, multi-process applications to take ad- tenance charges based on much higher original vantage of these new hardware capabilities. prices (when compared to today’s perfor- As the number of applications per server mance/price ratio), energy consumption, and rises, along with the number of users per sys- costly software licensing, which often is based tem, the reliability, and availability of the sys- on per core pricing that costs more to do the tem becomes a major CIO concern. Mission- work when older processors are doing the work. critical RAS1 features become a necessity. Why are five-year-old systems still responsible for the most important enterprise applications? 1 Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability. First of all, we cannot ignore the economy.

Many CIOs are hesitant to make large capital ing the next decade to ensure that the CIO can investments. However, in the data center where protect the continuing investment being made in an ROI of less than a year is common, reluc- enterprise infrastructure. Using Intel’s Itanium tance may be more a result of the FUD factor – in the converged infrastructure of HP’s Integrity the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, associated with is one answer. upgrading or changing server platforms. In many cases, the future is uncertain. While the The Intel Itanium Processor AIX server platform is based upon IBM’s pro- As with the mainframe and magnetic tape, prietary POWER architecture and Oracle’s is we are continually hearing reports on the immi- based upon Sun’s proprietary SPARC micro- nent death of Itanium. However, like the others, processor, the Integrity platform is based upon Itanium lives on! In a direct contradiction to a Intel’s Itanium microprocessor, designed speci- statement made by Oracle, Intel has stated that fically for mission-critical UNIX environments their work on Intel Itanium processors and ser- with mainframe-class RAS, in addition to many ver platforms is going to continue with multiple of the same features as Intel’s Xeon archi- generations of processors currently in develop- tecture. In the past, Itanium had been burdened ment and on schedule. While Tukwila, a 65-nm with multiple delays. Today, however, Intel’s processor with four cores, has already been deli- Itanium is well represented by the quad-core vered, Poulson, Intel’s next-generation 32-nm, Tukwila processor, deployed last year, while, at 8-core Itanium chip, is on track to more than the same time, Intel is planning for an eight- double the performance of the existing Tukwila core version, known internally as Poulson. architecture in early 2012. Intel also has com- Furthermore, a year after the announcement mitted to Kittson, the successor to Poulson. of the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, Kittson is an officially committed roadmap pro- the acquisition was finally completed, which duct from Intel for Itanium servers beyond became a year of indecision waiting for govern- Poulson and also is in active development, al- ment approval of the acquisition, not only in the though no details as to core count or func- U.S., but in Europe as well. While Oracle/Sun tionality are available. was in stealth mode, many Sun-based data cen- Poulson is both socket- and application- ters began to question Oracle’s intentions with compatible with Tukwila, making it an ideal regard to SPARC. The CIOs at these enter- upgrade target for servers already deployed with prises were concerned with the lack of a spe- the Itanium processor. It can protect the invest- cific hardware roadmap for SPARC-based ment that the enterprise has made in both ser- systems and a similar lack of definition on plans vers and applications, enabling the data center for their Solaris operating system. The most to continue to support their existing infrastruc- recent new product for the SPARC family is the ture. Tukwila, the Intel Itanium 9300, was UltraSPARC processor known as Niagara, designed to support four cores with two threads which was released in 2008, two years ago. per core, with up to 24MB of cache on the This further aggravated the issues of an aging Itanium 9350, the highest performing Itanium, server infrastructure, with CIOs reluctant to running at 1.73 GHz. The Itanium 9350 has a invest in Sun Fire systems. throughput of 4.80GT/s and consumes up to Just recently, Oracle announced the SPARC 185 Watts. T3 series; however, doubt still remains regar- On the other hand, Poulson, with a 32nm ding the long-term future of SPARC, as many process, has been designed with 8 cores and see Oracle primarily as a software company. 54MB of on-board memory, including a 32MB Additional concerns have been raised by Ora- L3 shared cache, consisting of eight 4MB cle’s decision to move to a new pricier and less blocks, one per core, and consuming up to only flexible Sun hardware support policy. As a re- 170 watts. There is no specification, yet, of the sult, many of these data centers are now mi- number of threads on each core, although grating away from SPARC and toward com- speculation is that each core will have Hyper- peting UNIX platforms. Threading of four threads per core. The solution to data center concerns is sim- In addition, there is 2MB of L2 data cache, ple. The data center needs an environment with 4MB of L2 instruction cache, and 2.2MB of a converged architecture, with tight integration director cache. With a Quick Path Interconnect between all components, and a roadmap cover- (QPI) of 6.4GT/s between processors and across

multiple system boards, Poulson has a QPI 33% HP has a full range of Integrity servers, faster than the 9300 series. Poulson will have a from blades and rack mount systems for the 12-instruction wide pipeline2 for increased in- smaller or mid-sized enterprise, to their Super- struction throughput, twice that of the 9300, dome platform and NonStop servers for the along with new data and instruction pipelines, a more sophisticated enterprise. OpenVMS is also new floating-point pipeline, as well as a new supported on the new HP Integrity blade and instruction buffer. In addition, Intel will con- rackmount servers. With all of these systems tinue its tradition of improving the RAS features designed with the same converged architecture, in order to achieve mainframe reliability and they are capable of consolidating and auto- resiliency, along with improving the power mating everything from the start. management functionality to reduce overall HP Integrity Blades power consumption, improving performance per watt. HP has delivered three new Integrity blades to offer 2.5x the compute density compared to The HP Integrity Platform traditional rack mount servers: the BL860c i2, BL870c i2, and BL890c i2. All three are based HP is confronting the IT sprawl that is upon the Itanium 9300 and feature HP’s unique manifest throughout every mission-critical data Blade Link technology, combining multiple center, with the world's first mission-critical blades to create 2-, 4-, and 8-socket systems. converged infrastructure using the Integrity HP Virtual Connect Flex-105 offers increased platform. Built on the industry's premier blade network scalability and configuration flexibility platform, HP brings a standards-based and with up to 20 times more networking band- modular architecture to mission-critical comput- width. These blades bring Integrity capabilities ing. In doing so, HP is eliminating the pro- and the Matrix Operating Environment to a prietary, static silos that have driven up costs c-Class form factor. and complexities in the past. HP is continuing their development and innovation of Itanium- HP Integrity Rackmount Servers based Integrity server platforms with its HP- The HP Integrity rackmount server line-up UX3 operating system, using a roadmap that includes entry-class and mid-range options. extends out more than 10 years. Last year, HP The entry-class server, the HP Integrity rx2800 launched the industry’s most modern mission- i2, with 1-to-4 quad-core processors, provide critical architecture in more than a decade. the flexibility needed for a variety of workloads, With the availability, today, of Integrity plat- multiple operating environments, and future forms using the Intel Itanium 9300 family business growth, all at the price/performance (Tukwila)4, along with the release of the next your enterprise expects. generation specification for the Poulson micro- The mid-range HP Integrity servers, with processor, HP will be able to keep pace with dual-core processors, are flexible, available IBM Power and Oracle SPARC upgrades. servers for business computing needs, incorpor- In addition, HP has announced that it will ating high-end functionality in the mid-range continue to support customers running existing market, perfect for multi-OS consolidation, versions of Oracle software on Integrity servers, scale-up, and performance applications. The both existing and future platforms, during the rx2800 can be configured with up to two pro- same timeframe. At the same time, HP has cessors with eight cores, up to 96GB of asked its customers who use Oracle applications memory, and up to 2.4TB of internal storage. on Integrity to request from Oracle continuing HP Integrity Superdome development of Oracle applications for Itanium servers, instead of deserting them. The HP Superdome 2 is HP’s ultimate mission-critical platform. For over 10 years, Super-

2 dome has been HP’s flagship, high-end Integrity Applications do not have to be recompiled to take server. It has powered some of the world’s advantage of Poulson’s 12-instruction pipeline. most demanding, mission-critical environments. 3 The latest update to HP-UX 11i v3 advances the mission- critical converged infrastructure with HP-UX innovations Superdome is the solution of choice for many that simplify availability and consolidation. 4 See The Clipper Group Navigator entitled Simplify- 5 See The Clipper Group Navigator entitled HP Builds ing the Data Center Environment with a Mission-Critical a Greener Environment Through a Virtualized Networking Converged Infrastructure dated May 18, 2010, and available Infrastructure dated December 5, 2008, and available at at http://www.clipper.com/research/TCG2010025.pdf. http://www.clipper.com/research/TCG2008062.pdf.

enterprise-class customers that require high Exhibit 1 – availability, rich virtualization capabilities, and long-term investment protection. With break- Integrity Superdome Features through innovations, such as the Superdome 2  A modular, bladed design, common com- Crossbar Fabric and Power-on-Once technol- ponents, and standard racks. ogy, the all-new Superdome 2 is well positioned  100+ innovations to ensure reliability and for the next decade of mission-critical com- resiliency. puting.  450% reliability boost, plus a host of self- With Superdome 2, HP pioneers a new diagnosing and self-healing features. category of modular, mission-critical systems  that scale up, out, and within to consolidate Fault-tolerant Crossbar Fabric that intelli- application tiers on a common platform. It gently routes transactions to the fastest, includes innovative features to ensure reliability optimal pathways between blades and I/O. and flexibility (See Exhibit 1, on the next page).  Architected for 64-socket scalability and It supports up to 128 Itanium 9300 quad-core designed to scale from 8 to 256 cores and processors, running at up to 1.73GHz, with up more. to 4TB of memory, all in order to increase  A 4x improvement in performance, in one- scalability, improve memory, and provide better half the size and at a lower entry price compute power without compromising per- point. formance. In fact, Superdome 2 provides a four  times improvement in performance in half of Power-on-once technology with hot-swap- the space. pable components, online replaceable crossbars, and the innovative Superdome 2 HP Integrity NonStop Servers Analysis Engine for predictive error han- HP Integrity NonStop systems6 deliver dling and analysis. 24x7x365 application availability with a mis-  Flexible I/O scaling to precisely provision sion-critical converged infrastructure, offering and repurpose capacity where needed. the best choice for critical and complex enterprise applications. This is especially crucial for  Three packages for scale-as-you-grow payment systems at financial institutions, which flexibility, offered in 8-socket, 16-socket now also must support the proliferation of and 32-socket configurations. multi-media and hand-held devices from mobile Source: HP operators, global manufacturing companies who are required to “follow the sun”, hospitals with the Itanium 9100; however, HP has recently centralized patient records, and public sector announced the availability of the HP Integrity organizations protecting national security. NonStop BladeSystem NB54000c, which is deployed with the newest Itanium processor, the These are ultra-robust servers delivering quad-core Itanium 9300. The NB54000c sup- better than mainframe class of service out of the ports up to 16 processors per node, with cluster box. They are ideal for supporting workloads scalability up to 4060 CPUs, with up to 192TB requiring 100% application availability, real- of memory, in support of the most rigorous time high-volume transaction processing, and processing requirements, with a common modu- exceptional security, scaling to handle billions lar architecture. The NB54000c extends the of transactions, across hundreds of terabytes of high end of NonStop computing, and thus hel- data, in real time. ping to protect the investment that mission-criti- HP Integrity NonStop servers utilize Intel’s cal enterprises have made in HP NonStop Itanium processor, but also employ a common platforms, doubling server performance within modular architecture with HP’s ProLiant fam- the same footprint and utilizing simple blade ily, thus extending HP’s converged infrastruc- swap upgrades to improve performance. ture. The majority of the line, including Blade- System and rackmount configurations, utilizes Conclusion As we have seen with the announcement of the Integrity NonStop NB54000c, HP continues 6 See The Clipper Group Navigator entitled HP Adds Blades to NonStop Architecture – Improves Performance, No to invest in the Integrity platform and the Itan- Impact on Reliability dated June 26, 2008, and available at ium microprocessor. They have stated that they http://www.clipper.com/research/TCG2008035.pdf.

remain committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating systems, such as NonStop and OpenVMS, that run on the Itanium architecture. HP, in fact, has already moved ahead of Oracle into second place in the UNIX market, while Oracle (Sun) has lost share, falling into third, all since Oracle announced it would acquire Sun in April of 2009. Oracle’s “announcement” of end-of-life for Itanium is an act of disinfor- mation, appearing to be an attempt to force customers into purchasing Sun servers in a desperate move to slow their declining market share. Staying with Integrity and Itanium makes sense for the short to medium term for the mission-critical enterprise, especially if the alterna- tive is migration of the entire set of applications to a new platform and a new environment. HP has indicated that it is committed to Itani- um/Integrity for the next decade and, in addition, has committed to supporting existing versions of Oracle software on existing, and future, Integrity platforms. As long as your needs are satisfied by existing Oracle software, HP will continue to support it. Oracle’s decision to stop supporting new versions of Itanium cannot help the company in the eyes of their customers. If Oracle wishes to placate this segment, then they may have to review this position. And what of the future of Itanium and Inte- grity? HP and Intel have stated that they are both firmly committed to continuing the development and innovation of Itanium-based Integrity server platforms with its HP-UX operating system for the next decade and beyond. If you need more of what you have – more processing power, more convergence, less energy waste, and a smaller footprint – then HP’s Integrity platform may be the answer. SM

About The Clipper Group, Inc. The Clipper Group, Inc., is an independent consulting firm specializing in acquisition decisions and strategic advice regarding complex, enterprise-class information technologies. Our team of industry professionals averages more than 25 years of real-world experience. A team of staff consultants augments our capabilities, with significant experience across a broad spectrum of applications and environments.  The Clipper Group can be reached at 781-235-0085 and found on the web at www.clipper.com. About the Author David Reine is a Senior Contributing Analyst for The Clipper Group. Mr. Reine specializes in enterprise servers, storage, and software, strategic business solutions, and trends in open systems architectures. In 2002, he joined The Clipper Group after three decades in server and storage product marketing and program management for Groupe Bull, Zenith Data Systems, and Honeywell Information Systems. Mr. Reine earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Tufts University, and an MBA from Northeastern University.  Reach David Reine via e-mail at [email protected] or at 781-235-0085 Ext. 123. (Please dial “123” when you hear the automated attendant.)

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